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This book discusses the complex relation between modernity and cinema drawing particularly upon the European and American cinema during the second half of the twentieth century. In this period, the author argues, the terms `modernist' and `post-modern' are both inappropriate to the cinema's critical vision of modernity. Instead there emerges a
neo-modern movement which subverts American melodrama and supplants Italian neo-realism, yet also echoes the earlier modernisms of Dreyer, Eisenstein, Bunuel and Fritz Lang.
In the American cinema attention is paid to the work of Welles, Hitchcock and the changing patterns of
film noir. In the European cinema, the author re-assesses the French New Wave, the Italian cinema after neo-realism and the complex retro-vision by European film-makers of the politics of fascism. The work of Bergman, Antonioni, Godard, Bertolucci, Rohmer and Wenders is discussed in relation to the changing role of cinematic space and modern vision of the automobile and the city, together with the new forms of tragicomedy and apocalypse in the cinema of the nuclear age.
The book regards
critique as the dominant mode of film study, thus breaking down the artificial boundaries which currently exist between theory, history and textual reading. Its intellectual heritage lies firmly in the writings of Nietzsche, Freud and Sartre, and opposes the current dependence upon semiology and post-structuralism. It is thus an attempt to rethink the relation of film-making to the contemporary world. The book challenges many of the critical complacencies of post-modernism and offers a fresh perspective upon the development of the modern cinema.
It will be essential reading for all students of film theory, popular culture and communications.
List of contents
List of Illustrations. Preface.
Acknowledgements.
1. Film and the Paradox of the Modern.
2. Tragicomedy and the Cool Apocalypse.
3. The Double and the Innocent.
4. The Power of the Gaze.
5. The Absent Image and the Unreal Object.
6. Commodified Demons I: The Machine and the Mask.
7. Commodified Demons II: The Automobile.
8. The Strange Passions of Film Noir.
Notes.
Select Bibliography.
Select Filmography.
Index.
About the author
John Orr is the author of several previous books including,
The Making of the Twentieth Century Novel (1987) and
Cinema and Fiction (co-author, 1992).
Summary
aeo This is a controversial study of the development of the modern cinema which analyses film as a distinctive social and cultural form. aeo The book rejects current post--structuralist theories of the cinema and also criticises the concept of postmodernity as a means of exploring developments in cinema.
